US government to back massive effort to understand the brain

We have details on what's being proposed, and what the research will tell us.

Over the weekend, The New York Timesreported that the Obama administration is preparing to launch biology into its first big project post-genome: mapping the activity and processes that power the human brain. The initial report suggested that the project would get roughly $3 billion dollars over 10 years to fund projects that would provide an unprecedented understanding of how the brain operates.

But the report was remarkably short on the scientific details of what the studies would actually accomplish or where the money would actually go. To get a better sense, we talked with Brown University's John Donoghue, who is one of the academic researchers who has been helping to provide the rationale and direction for the project. Although he couldn't speak for the administration's plans, he did describe the outlines of what's being proposed and why, and he provided a glimpse into what he sees as the project's benefits.

What are we talking about doing?

We've already made great progress in understanding the behavior of individual neurons, and scientists have done some excellent work in studying small populations of them. On the other end of the spectrum, decades of anatomical studies have provided us with a good picture of how different regions of the brain are connected. "There's a big gap in our knowledge because we don't know the intermediate scale," Donaghue told Ars. The goal, he said, "is not a wiring diagram—it's a functional map, an understanding."

This would involve a combination of things, including looking at how larger populations of neurons within a single structure coordinate their activity, as well as trying to get a better understanding of how different structures within the brain coordinate their activity. What scale of neuron will we need to study? Donaghue answered that question with one of his own: "At what point does the emergent property come out?" Things like memory and consciousness emerge from the actions of lots of neurons, and we need to capture enough of those to understand the processes that let them emerge. Right now, we don't really know what that level is. It's certainly "above 10," according to Donaghue. "I don't think we need to study every neuron," he said. Beyond that, part of the project will focus on what Donaghue called "the big question"—what emerges in the brain at these various scales?"

While he may have called emergence "the big question," it quickly became clear he had a number of big questions in mind. Neural activity clearly encodes information, and we can record it, but we don't always understand the code well enough to understand the meaning of our recordings. When I asked Donaghue about this, he said, "This is it! One of the big goals is cracking the code."

Donaghue was enthused about the idea that the different aspects of the project would feed into each other. "They go hand in hand," he said. "As we gain more functional information, it'll inform the connectional map and vice versa." In the same way, knowing more about neural coding will help us interpret the activity we see, while more detailed recordings of neural activity will make it easier to infer the code.

As we build on these feedbacks to understand more complex examples of the brain's emergent behaviors, the big picture will emerge. Donaghue hoped that the work will ultimately provide "a way of understanding how you turn thought into action, how you perceive, the nature of the mind, cognition."

How will we actually do this?

Perception and the nature of the mind have bothered scientists and philosophers for centuries—why should we think we can tackle them now? Donaghue cited three fields that had given him and his collaborators cause for optimism: nanotechnology, synthetic biology, and optical tracers. We've now reached the point where, thanks to advances in nanotechnology, we're able to produce much larger arrays of electrodes with fine control over their shape, allowing us to monitor much larger populations of neurons at the same time. On a larger scale, chemical tracers can now register the activity of large populations of neurons through flashes of fluorescence, giving us a way of monitoring huge populations of cells. And Donaghue suggested that it might be possible to use synthetic biology to translate neural activity into a permanent record of a cell's activity (perhaps stored in DNA itself) for later retrieval.

Right now, in Donaghue's view, the problem is that the people developing these technologies and the neuroscience community aren't talking enough. Biologists don't know enough about the tools already out there, and the materials scientists aren't getting feedback from them on ways to make their tools more useful.

Since the problem is understanding the activity of the brain at the level of large populations of neurons, the goal will be to develop the tools needed to do so and to make sure they are widely adopted by the bioscience community. Each of these approaches is limited in various ways, so it will be important to use all of them and to continue the technology development.

Assuming the information can be recorded, it will generate huge amounts of data, which will need to be shared in order to have the intended impact. And we'll need to be able to perform pattern recognition across these vast datasets in order to identify correlations in activity among different populations of neurons. So there will be a heavy computational component as well.

Donoghue told Ars he only got involved after this point, as the effort began to focus more on the human brain and somewhat less on model organisms (though these will likely have to be used for some aspects of the studies). Given the large role that the government plays in funding biomedical research in the US, it was essential to get it involved. "We see this as a coordinating effort for funding that's already there to ensure maximal effective use of the funds," Donaghue said. Although he hopes there will be ways to obtain additional money for the project as a whole, the overall scope of the project is such that many of its goals can be accomplished through existing funding mechanisms.

One of the reasons is that Donaghue expects that most of the work can be done via the existing model of funding many individual investigators. Although the project is being compared to the human genome effort, that was mostly completed through a handful of sequencing centers with highly specialized and expensive equipment. Donaghue expects that most of the work can be done with materials that will be within the reach of independent labs. There will be some need to coordinate data sharing and computational resources, but the actual work of studying the brain is likely to be distributed widely within the research community.

The key features will really be the coordination and focus of the effort, along with the interdisciplinary technology development described above.

Why would we want to do this?

Understanding consciousness, decision making, and memory don't do it for you? That's OK; Donaghue suggested that the work could have huge commercial payoffs in both health and computing.

For computing, we may begin to understand why the human brain badly outperforms computers on a number of tasks like image recognition and language comprehension. As an example, he pointed out that humans can read the distorted text of CAPTCHAs without (usually) too much struggle, yet they still pose a barrier to computers. Understanding how the brain manages this and other feats could allow us to design computers or software that can perform similar tasks. "You'll get a lot more spam," Donaghue joked, "but you might get intelligent readers that recognize spam." He could clearly envision a lot of additional applications for this sort of computerized text comprehension.

On the medical side, Donaghue noted that consciousness emerges from the network of interactions that take place in the brain. Many neural disorders—the loss of memory in Alzheimers, the erratic thought in schizophrenia, the unregulated emotions of depression—are all disruptions of this underlying network. Understanding how it operates is an essential step in figuring out how to intervene. Donaghue argued that if we could use that knowledge to, say, add 10 years of health to the typical Alzheimer's patient, then we'd save more than the entire cost of the program.

In his view, even if you're not a neurobiologist, you should be hoping this program gets off the ground.

Maybe this study will get us more synthetic emergent behavior simulations. If it takes, say, a few hundred neurons to get some core brain behavior going we should be able to recreate that using somewhat ordinary electronics (if you include a bunch of separate processors, A/D-D/A conversion, and DSP's).

Understanding how it operates is an essential step in figuring out how to intervene. Donaghue argued that if we could use that knowledge to, say, add 10 years of health to the typical Alzheimer's patient, then we'd save more than the entire cost of the program.

I see where Donaghue was going with his statement, but saying that adding 10 years of health to an Alzheimers patient, even all of them, will magically save us over 10 billion dollars seems a bit... of a stretch.

The mind and the brain are not the same. You can study the brain but you will not be able to read their minds.

Of course you can, unless you are deeply religious who believes that mind process occur not in the brain but the soul. This is very easily disproved by the abrupt changes in behavior after brain injuries of many people.

If you understand the brain and how it works, you will know how to read the mind.In fact, we already do. It is already shown possible to read a low resolution image of what people are thinking through fMRI.

What is the real purpose behind this effort? I'm betting the military wants the tech to be able to "read the thoughts" of so-called terrorists, or implant thoughts into the same. This government does nothing without a military or monetary benefit to some connected corporation.

Don't forget, tin foil has been scientifically proven to block government mind control rays! Just don't use that Chinese foil. That one's actually an antenna! :-0

I see where Donaghue was going with his statement, but saying that adding 10 years of health to an Alzheimers patient, even all of them, will magically save us over 10 billion dollars seems a bit... of a stretch.

actually it'd probably be more than that:

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AD-associated costs include direct medical costs such as nursing home care, direct nonmedical costs such as in-home day care, and indirect costs such as lost productivity of both patient and caregiver. Numbers vary between studies but dementia costs worldwide have been calculated around $160 billion, while costs of Alzheimer's disease in the United States may be $100 billion each year.

This sounds like the kind of investment in basic research that the government should really be doing more of. America in particular seems to have fallen back in terms of the fundamental, long term investment upon which major shifts are built. The brain is the root of us all, yet also overall remains a big black box. Better understanding of the brain, and better technology to interact with it, would have consequences not just for physical medical disorders and psychology, but also brain-computer interfaces, digitization, and other areas we haven't even thought of yet. It's worth far more funding then even this.

0tim0 wrote:

This sounds like a pissing contest with the Europeans who just announced they are also are putting a bunch of money behind brain research.

No, it sounds like long a overdue effort to investigate something extremely important to all humans, no matter where they are.

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Honestly, I'd rather we put some money behind something more practical.

Honestly, I'd like you and every other person in every thread who always says that basic research should be dumped in favor of something "more practical" actually try arguing their case for once. You need to show why it's a zero-sum game, why it'd happen anyway, why this particular money is what bothers you vs, say, agriculture subsidies which are orders of magnitude more, etc.

Someone needs to tell the president that our country is broke and we can't afford initiatives like this anymore.

Actually I believe we cant afford to NOT do research and take on initiatives like this. Like any research, they are expensive upfront, then useful applications in the long run. Its kind of like a mullet with the party in the front, business in the back now that I think about it.

I see where Donaghue was going with his statement, but saying that adding 10 years of health to an Alzheimers patient, even all of them, will magically save us over 10 billion dollars seems a bit... of a stretch.

actually it'd probably be more than that:

Yeah, frozentech made a really odd statement there. 10 billion is dirt in the context of medical expenses, which also tend to be massively nonlinear (tens of dollars to prevent a condition upfront, tens to hundreds of thousands to try to treat it after it gets going, if it's possible at all). Something that would grant even months, let alone years or decades, of additional productive independence to large numbers of people is absolutely huge.

The mind and the brain are not the same. You can study the brain but you will not be able to read their minds.

Of course you can, unless you are deeply religious who believes that mind process occur not in the brain but the soul. This is very easily disproved by the abrupt changes in behavior after brain injuries of many people.

If you understand the brain and how it works, you will know how to read the mind.In fact, we already do. It is already shown possible to read a low resolution image of what people are thinking through fMRI.

Someone needs to tell the president that our country is broke and we can't afford initiatives like this anymore.

Someone needs to tell you that low cost, long-term core research has been the foundation of modern society and is one of the most productive and high ROI tasks a government can engage in. While telling you that, perhaps they would invite you take a look at the national budget at some point and identify exactly what percentages are going where, the difference between "entitlement" and "discretionary" spending, etc. Or perhaps you could even go look it up yourself, so as to actually have a bit of a clue! Nah, probably got a little crazy at the end there.

It's likely just money that is put towards seeding projects like they've done with alternative energy and a myriad of "efficient and smart" programs that have been put in place under the Obama Administration. Gone are the days of $20 billion earmarks dumped into some shady and obscure company.

The mind and the brain are not the same. You can study the brain but you will not be able to read their minds.

Of course you can, unless you are deeply religious who believes that mind process occur not in the brain but the soul. This is very easily disproved by the abrupt changes in behavior after brain injuries of many people.

If you understand the brain and how it works, you will know how to read the mind.In fact, we already do. It is already shown possible to read a low resolution image of what people are thinking through fMRI.

Hmmm, humans are still better at CAPTCHAs than computers? I don't know about that, I'd say > 50% of the CAPTCHAs I get are indecipherable by a human. Or more precisely, they are either indecipherable or I think I have read it but the verification algorithm disagrees.

CAPTCHAs have about reached their limit of usefulness. Any more difficult to read (which they will have to become as the recognizers get better), and lots of people will be in danger of getting locked out of their accounts (TURING TEST FAIL: your request for human status is denied).

This sounds like a pissing contest with the Europeans who just announced they are also are putting a bunch of money behind brain research.

Lay down the US crack pipe please. How do you know this specific project isn't being done in *co-operation* with the Europeans? Oh yes, it's right there in the article itself. The Wellcome Trust is a UK organisation, & one of the world's largest funders of medical research. Their HQ is round the corner from my office in London. They're contributing to this project. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wellcome_Trust

The article says the work will be widely distributed; which strongly implies a global research effort, with global funding and global research. Good to see all these PhDs being put to some use.

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If we had a true system of electronic health records, for example, we could do huge cross-population studies of the affects of particular treatments. This could have a huge effect on health care costs -- an effectiveness. Seems like a much more useful way to spend that money.

Hey, that's quite a good idea - I withdraw my crack-pipe comment above. Actually, this is already being done quite extensively. Where do you think these research papers comparing the effects of treatments on cohorts of >10,000 people come from?

I imagine being able to start from a consistent initial with varying outside influences would be very interesting for theories on brain development and perhaps behavioral analysis. It doesn't sound like they will be able to look at epigenetics though. I was curious if the genetics in a person's brain could be reprogramed and that might be part of how certain disorders emerge. I'm sure it will be used for things intended to harm and control, but because the work should happen in the public domain, countermeasures can be developed. Quality of life can be improved, and it will almost certainly be used for recreation in some way.I am FAR less worried about this in the public domain than in a closed lab at a corporate entity that can get away with less accountability.

What is the real purpose behind this effort? I'm betting the military wants the tech to be able to "read the thoughts" of so-called terrorists, or implant thoughts into the same. This government does nothing without a military or monetary benefit to some connected corporation.

As stated by the article, "Understanding how it operates is an essential step in figuring out how to intervene."

In conclusion, the government wants to read your thoughts. Perhaps, without a warrant under some redefined understanding of "voluntary". This ties in nicely with the temporary tattoo (see link) that can monitor your brainwaves remotely. It gives the government a method to determine whether their subjects are completely loyal.

Honestly, I'd like you and every other person in every thread who always says that basic research should be dumped in favor of something "more practical" actually try arguing their case for once. You need to show why it's a zero-sum game, why it'd happen anyway, why this particular money is what bothers you vs, say, agriculture subsidies which are orders of magnitude more, etc.

I didn't make any comment about agriculture subsidies, I'm not sure where that comes from.

As for why it's, as you say, a "zero sum game" it is because we are talking about the government's budget. The government has some amount of money to distribute. When you add up all the money it spends it "sums" to some amount. If I put money in one place, I have to remove it from another. I'm not sure why that seems complicated to you.

Instead of me explaining why the government has a limited budget, you should explain why we shouldn't try to be pragmatic with what we spend. It's one thing to say that you think there is a good reason to study the brain. It's another for you to say that we shouldn't consider whether there is or isn't.

--t

I think what he's wanting to know is why are you concerned about the piddly amount of money that's spent on basic research and other small-scale budget line items like public broadcasting, etc. and not the MASSIVE amount of money and graft which is wasted on expensive defense boondoggles designed to support the aerospace industry or massive agricultural subsidies that do nothing but support anti-American corporations like Monsanto.

Basic research is an investment, not a money pit. It reaps dividends which benefit society, industry, and the individual citizen. Moreover, basic research isn't something private industry and - increasingly - universities don't touch because it's not immediately profitable. They RELY on government to bankroll research like this because they can't. How else would you suggest this research get done in a free market which won't touch it because the financial rewards aren't immediate enough?

Meanwhile, agriculture and fossil fuel subsidies gain us nothing for America or our citizenry. All they do is ensure continued campaign contributions to the politicians which support them at the expense of the citizenry. Where's your outrage at that?

I think what he's wanting to know is why are you concerned about the piddly amount of money that's spent on basic research and other small-scale budget line items like public broadcasting, etc. and not the MASSIVE amount of money and graft which is wasted on expensive defense boondoggles designed to support the aerospace industry or massive agricultural subsidies that do nothing but support anti-American corporations like Monsanto.

"Other things are more wasteful" is a really weak defense for spending. You can justify almost any spending with this argument. For the record, I support the president's plan to spend more on brain research.